Im randy may, president of the Free State Foundation and im pleased to welcome you to the Free State Foundations ninth annual Telecom Policy conference i want to extend an especially warm welcome to our cspan audience. Im going to selfconfessed, i may cspan junkie. Some of you may have heard me say that before. My mom may she rest in peace she always worried a told her that i was a cspan junkie never really knowing what i meant by that. Im always pleased and grateful when cspan is here. Welcome, to the cspan audience. This years annual Conference Follows on the heels of the 10th Anniversary Gala last december, so next year annual conference will be in double digits for this event, also. It confirms the old adage that time flies when youre having fun and i might add it when you busy as well. Almost every year i say some of you know this i say our annual Telecom Policy conference just keeps getting bigger, better and more impactful. Well, as long as it remains true im going to keep saying it. Even though we had to reschedule this years conference because our first date march 14, happened to be the only snow day this winter in washington, i think this years conference upholds the tradition with a quick glance at the program showing why the conference is a must attend event for anyone interested in communications, internet and high tech law and policy. I know you will agree that we have an Outstanding Group of speakers and program sessions. The program that you have here, its also on our website. If you need another copy or want to download it near the top of our home page. The theme for this years conference is a new direction for communication policy, less regulation, more investment and innovation. With a new fcc and a new congress in place the opportunity is right for charting a free market oriented direction for communications, law and policy. As most of you know, at the fcc under the leadership of new chairman who will be with us for our lunch session today the agency is already charting a new free market oriented direction. We will be spending a lot of time today talking about the implications of this new course. Including, what it means for innovation and investment, but most importantly what it means for our nations consumers. I have a hunch that at one time or another today the subject of the fccs new Net Neutrality proceeding or open internet proceeding as the previous fcc chairman preferred or restoring freedom is the current fcc chairman prefers, in any event that proceeding by whatever name you want to call it im sure will come up and it should because its been important proceeding for the fcc. Aside from the conversation that im going to have with sec chairman pai at lunchtime we have a stellar lineup for todays program. A the First Program will feature howard sharansky and boyden gray , here. Again i have in your program the titles and bios we are going to follow this session with an allstar panel lineup and then immediately following the Panel Session we will break a short time for a very nice buffet lunch. I guarantee you it will be nice, but i hope most of you are here for the program and not just for the lunch. Then, we will have a conversation with chairman pai and then we are honored to have the two acting directors of the federal trade commission with us for the after lunch session. Tadd lipsky and todd paul will tom paul will be featured at that session and winding up Michelle Connelly who is a professor at Duke University and a member of Free State Foundations board of academic advisors will offer some final thoughts. Now, remember to tweet if you are tweeter. The handle, i think we have the twitter handle on each table, fsfconf9, which shall call to mind the conference nine. Before we get started i went to take a second to acknowledge and thank some of our Staff Members that are here. Kathy baker is our Events Coordinator and communications quarter nader and associate has a awful lot to do with this event and we appreciate her. Lets give a round of applause if we can. [applause]. Then, i went to acknowledge the scholarly work by two of our Staff Members that are here and their contribution. Senior fellow seth cooper. Seth will moderate the program after lunch and Research Fellow mike corney, their contribution to our work at the Free State Foundation is very very important and then finally, i want to introduce to you our newest senior fellow ted bullinger. Ted joined us and midmarch. Ted is a phd economist and a lawyer. Really combines the law and economic expertise, so ted, if you could please stand up so people will see who you are. [applause]. Thanks to all of them and finally, i just want to thank as i often do, but sometimes forget to do, my wife lori. She actually does an awful lot of work for the Free State Foundation that goes unrecognized with behindthescenes work and when i say that im not even referring to what she does tolerating without too much grumbling the often insane hours that i put in early for the Free State Foundation, so i appreciate everything that lori does and maybe you could think thank her with me. [applause] that, lets get started with our first session and im just going to introduce our speakers first. With their indulgence and yours to i will hit some highlights that are in their bios and i refer you to the more complete bios in the brochure. Our initial speaker and really keynote for the day is howard sharansky. Howard is a professor of law in Georgetown University law school and a partner as well. Importantly for purposes today the former administrator in president Obamas Administration of the office of information and regulatory affairs, which is within the office of management and budgets rent deposition referred to as the regulatory czar. Im not sure if howard likes that or not, but that is the fact. Howard again, just briefly he is a former director of the bureau of economics and he is he also serves previously as chief economist of the fcc from 1999 to 2000 and a senior economist for the president s council of economic advisers during president clintons administration, so again and howard as well as ted have degrees in a phd in economics and also a law degree. By the way, im not sure i mentioned it, but the topic of this session and you will see how howard in the next speaker will introduce had that experience expertise to to talk about is Lessons Learned improving regulation and government administration, so its hard to find someone more qualified. Along with boyden gray. Boyden grays a Founding Partner boyden gray and associates, a former u. S. Ambassador to the European Union is a former white House Counsel and although very pertinent to our program today he was counsel back in the first Bush Administration, George Hw Bush to the president , h. W. Bush to the president , president ial task force on regulatory relief for which he wrote the original executive order, 12291. We dont want to get hung up on numbers here. He can fill us in on what that was. Someone told me once when i had another ambassador on our program. We had a few that once you are ambassador that that title never leaves you and you are always ambassador so, if i forget a longtime friend of mine and if i forget, i ask your indulgence with that. Another thing i want to say before we get started is he left off of his resume, its left off of the official bio probably the most important of what i can get the most important position that he held during his illustrious career is a former chair of the section of Administrative Law and regulatory practice of the aba. That might not strike you as being as important as ambassador to the eu, but i am a former chair of that section as well. So, i consider that to be important and boyd, when i was serving my year just a oneyear deal. When i was serving my year as head of the section Administrative Law i was asked whether i wanted could be ambassador at that time and because i had that other job i had to decline that, but i wasnt able to do it. But, anyway, now you know about his other position. With that introduction i will turn it over to howard to get us started and then we will get reaction. Thank you, randy. Its an honor to be hereunto sherrie podium with podium with you and with boyd who is really in some way just the founder of regulatory review and Regulatory Reform and as someone anyone who has worked in my position has served people who are founders and foundational thinkers in the area and boyden is one of them. What i want to talk about today is regulatory process and Regulatory Reform and i think there are some Lessons Learned at least that i learned over the last four years of the Obama Administration doing regulatory review about the heart of regulation, what works and what doesnt and why we need to be careful when we embark upon a series of fixes through legislation or other kinds of means because there are some very good things in our regulatory system. There are things that could use fixing, but fixing them is hard and we will want to proceed carefully and i think that is important to get across right now that there is i think a lot of fairly radical rethinking of the federal governments regulatory program. I tend to think radical rethinkings are good things because they stir things up and get people thinking, but as long as people think with a cool head and are willing to acknowledge that some stuff they may take our wrong, back up and try different path and also so we dont rush too quickly into legislation that locks as into what is inferior regulatory system. So, i would start with the premise that the us has probably that the u. S. Has probably the best most transparent and most Accounting System of regulatory process in the world. One of the jobs i had as administrator was to go around the world often with our ambassador, our ustr, i had mike froman and to negotiate with foreign governments or entities on Regulatory Reform issues, regulatory harmonization and one of the things that made that difficult was many places regulation happens completely out of a black box. There is some kind of summary of a rule or some kind of description of an intent to regulate, some kind of pulmonary report of the effects of the rule and then a boom regulation pops out in some backroom and there are very few bases in which one can actually challenge that ruling get it we thought. Get it rethought. Compare that to what we have under the administrative procedure act. There are a few exceptions, but by and large an agency has to issue a proposal, that proposed rule has to go out for Public Notice and comment. That agency that has to issue a final rule built upon the record that includes that notice and comment in Response Agency makes to those comments and at the end of it all the agency is subject to judicial review. This works fairly well, lots of rules get challenged in court. Lots of rules get remanded or struck down. Sure, that is a costly process, but if you think of the and symptoms incentives for agencies to do a good job in rulemaking, one can see its not a bad system. The public is involved early on and the public has a chance to call the agency to account at the end. That is rare. Not only that what the public gets to comment on is the rule. What the public gets to see in support of the rule is the Regulatory Impact analysis, not a white paper describing what some people think that affects might be, but the analysis and things that can get challenged and brought before a court. One wants to think twice before one backs up fundamentally changes the system that actually has even if not perfect or costless a pretty good system of transparency and accountability built into it. Its a very rare kind of thing. Lets me back up and talk about the things that i think are Lessons Learned and lessons things we need to fix it regulation and what we might do to come up with an even bigger and even better regulatory system going forward. What is the job of a regulator or Regulatory Review Office . I throw that in because that was my job. So the is to identify a real first problem. This may sound like an obvious statement, but its not always the case of regulations that agencies issue addressing problems that are genuine, that is to say occurring or very likely to occur. Sometimes one sees regulation that is well meant to get ahead of a problem to stop it before it starts, but without sufficient grounding to be sure the problem is actually going to occur. That is a very Weak Foundation on which to do regulation because then the benefits, which i will talk about in a minute are always a difficult thing to make and to prove become even harder because not only are the benefits harder to examine because they are in the future, they are hardly contingent on the problem even occurring and its hard to make a good case for regulation and hard to make a case to the parties that must bear the cost of the regulation when the regulation to begin with is the benefits of the regulation are contingent on a problem actually occurring, so identifying a real problem in having a convincing case this is a problem society should solve is the first issue. I will start by saying i think sometimes there is insufficient attention to making that case. Agencies could do a better job making that case. Is not typically what agencies are set up to do. They look at statutory authorization, to a mandate from congress or petition from the public or some event that has happened and they respond. The communications aspect of explaining what they are doing and why they are doing it is not always done very well. Sometimes thats because its a hard case to make. Well, thats all the more Reason Agency should have to get out there and make the case. If its a hard case to make then maybe its not a real problem or that the problem is one that is too costly to solve, so identifying the rule and communicating and making that case convincingly is the first step in rulemaking. The next step is to identify potential Effective Solutions to that problem and i Say Solutions because again, another shortcoming that i find even within our overall quite could quite good regulatory system is agencies tend to move quickly towards a solution to a problem. Thats not always the case by any stretch of the imagination. One of the things i found as administrator was that many proposed rules on very significant issues came into the Office Without much examination or regulatory alternative beyond the proposal of the agency. Regulatory alternatives are important, discussing them and even analyzing them in a quite rigorous way because they show the public when the rule goes out for notice and comment what else might be a possible approach. What are the other things the agency thought about and rejected or at least became less convinced for appropriate solutions to the problem. There are a number of reasons one wants to do that could different alternatives will have different costbenefit profiles. Different alternatives will elicit different data and, from the public and actually the edges who may find out something that they inside their sort of close circle of people working on the rule, they may find this information that can convince them they made them mistaken pursuit alternatives. Identifying potential Effective Solutions for that problem and even if the Agency Proposes one of those two nonetheless be one of those, to nonetheless be transparent in discussing and explaining what alternatives there might be. This is in the executive orders that govern regulatory review in the executive branch. They had been there i can throw out a lot of numbers. Executive order 13610, all great executive orders that actually since president reagan every administration regardless of Political Party has seen fit to reiterate and a strengthened on very similar principles of regulatory review. So, alternatives are big one. Now, the third thing im about to identify here is probably in some sense the most controversial. That is determined that the proposed solution and indeed any alternatives that might be discussed and offered up as possible proposals are possible rules down the road, proposed solutions that problems should not impose costs that outweigh the benefits of solving the problem. Now, that sounds obvious. Why would we undertake a rule that is more costly than the benefits it brings, but this is extremely fraught exercise. The executive orders do not say and i think they are right not to say that the quantified benefits of a rule must exceed the quantified cost of the rule and i think one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in Regulatory Reform would be to issue a mandate that says no rule shall be issued in the quantified benefit that this not offset its quantified cost. That would be a disaster for a number of reasons. First of all, there are rules that this society chooses to put in place that have non quantifiable benefit, distributional object